Iona Lee on her new poetry zine Beasties

“My inclinations are always towards the macabre,” says Iona Lee from her kitchen table, as we chat over Zoom. “I’ve done a lot of work on witchcraft and the witch trials, magic and the occult… that is just naturally where I end up.” Lee is not exaggerating. From Away With the Faeries, her film poem retelling of the fairy ballad Tam Lin (for which she won the John Byrne Award) to her first solo collection Anamnesis which deals with nostalgia and lost moments, Lee is not a poet to shy away from darkness.

Her new zine is no exception. Created as part of her three-month residency at Typewronger Books, Beasties draws inspiration from the grizzly world of animal testing, alchemy, cabinets of curiosity and the underbelly of medical science. “What has been on my mind in the last year and a bit is this dark history that Edinburgh has, and its connection to medical study and scientific advancements,” Lee explains.

As an Edinburgh-based poet, Lee has a deep font to draw from. When she is not writing and creating, Lee is a tour guide, introducing tourists to Edinburgh’s many tales of murder, ghosts, ‘witch’ trials and, of course, body snatching. “Obviously, one of the stories I have to tell on my tour is Burke and Hare. The medical schools were making use of poor people as a means to an end, and that was who was ending up on the dissecting tables. That’s what I was trying to get at [in Beasties], the way that we use each other, and animals, in order to advance ourselves.”

Beasties was inspired by the gory history of Summerhall (née the Royal Dick Veterinary School), where students, teachers and researchers left behind textbooks, beakers, bones and (if the rumours are true) blood-stained cages. “[Poet] Michael Pedersen told me that when Neu Reekie first started doing their gig in Summerhall not long after it opened, you could go into a bit where there were cages that still had blood in them,” Lee explains eagerly. “An elephant was dissected in the room where we all now go clubbing.”

In contrast, the zine is a lovely thing. Sitting neatly in the palm of the hand, its blue and red risograph pages concertina out into one long sheet. It can be read like a book or – if the reader is inclined to unfold it to its full length – a mini-fresco, interspersing stanzas with images of vessels containing small creatures, filled with gore, wrapped in veins. This encounter between different media is not a new way of working for Lee. From her band Acolyte to her recent project with StANza Poetry Festival, in which she created a poem from binary code (originating with jacquard loom patterns), Lee is not one to be contained to a single artform. 

“I have always naturally been interdisciplinary… I always want to add music, or add art,” she explains. For Beasties, she draws on her art school training and Masters degree to create the risograph collages and text design that spill throughout the pages, with elements collected (with kind permission) from the alchemical esoterica section of her friend’s shop, The Royal Mile Gallery, which stocks antique maps, prints and reproductions. 

“In my Masters I studied alchemy… or I tried to,” says Lee. “It’s esoteric and mysterious on purpose: so many of the illustrations are secret codes because the alchemists were trying to hide their work from other people. What I was mainly drawn to was the alchemical drawings. They’re so gorgeous. Most things appear in vases, or ‘aludels’ – the glass vessels they would do the experiments in. It's something to do with the mother and creating new life. Everything is a metaphor in alchemy, which is another reason why I was looking into it, because it's kind of visual poetry.”

The visual invention of Beasties has much in common with Lee’s debut collection Anamnesis and its rich imagistic sensibility, but the process for making them could not be further apart. “The book took me about five years,” Lee reminisces, “because, well, I had to get better as a writer. I think what I would have published five years ago would have been not so good.” Beasties, on the other hand, emerged with an organic kind of inevitability, as image and text worked to mutually shape each other. Lee’s illustration background gave her a confidence with the form, a confidence she still feels hesitant about when it comes to writing.

“Sometimes I feel like there’s a secret shadowy school where people who studied writing go, and then they get taught all the secret rules that make a good poem,” she says. “And if you didn’t learn that, then you don’t quite know what you’re doing. I always have this silly little insecurity of like, maybe I don’t know what I’m doing and it shows.” Is there a kind of freedom there? “It’s a slightly different brain,” Lee muses, a way of approaching poetry with fewer boundaries, and a greater scope for creativity. Looking at Beasties, Lee’s otherworldly, lyrical collage of Edinburgh’s past and present, it’s hard to disagree.

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Beasties is out now with Typewronger Books
Iona Lee will be appearing at Book Fringe at Typewronger Books on 24 Aug at 6pm